Evidence and logic. The most important public policy number in the universe is the maximum possible speed of improvement for students from poverty.

If as you imply, we are there, then our current system is morally defensible and we should all protect it dearly. However, even a casual glance at the data reveals that we are nowhere close to living up to these students potential.

That makes our existing education system horribly racist - just a fact, just a purely logical conclusion.

And, its getting worse, not better. The productivity of the American k-12 education system has fallen 15% since the year 2000, 5% just since 2011.

There is going to be a "cake walk" if you will for seats once McCain makes his retirement plans. Long dollars say McSally could be moved to his seat, but Kelli Ward is making a lot of noise for it. Ducey says he won't name himself. If he moves McSally her seat would then be another appointment of a southern Arizonan, of which there are numerous possibilities.

It would be fun to start a list, before Jim Click does. God rest his soul Emil Franzi would have been fun in that position. Anybody seen Roy Laos lately?

I disagree with your foundational premise. A white child born in 2003 (i.e., a High School freshman today) has not been brought up in an educational system (or a society) that sustains white supremacy, or that even permits any positive expression of white identity. Quite the opposite.

But we don't have to agree on this.

My hypothetical AAS program would not be based on the milquetoast, IMPLICITLY pro-white narrative present in U.S. education prior to, say, the 1990s. It would be EXPLICITLY pro-white. One of its goals would be to encourage the formation of a positive white identity among its students.

And my point is just that we would never permit such a thing, even if it managed to create significantly improved educational outcomes among poor and otherwise disadvantaged white students. One of the reasons we would never permit it is because is because encouraging ethnic chauvinism is bad for social cohesion.

Nathan K, you've posed an interesting thought experiment. One problem with it is, your laboratory in the classroom is isolated from the rest of society. It doesn't take into account that this country's culture overwhelmingly presents the world from a white perspective. A "White Studies" program which overstated the white dominance argument would be reinforcing what people have heard in this country since its inception. We've made some advances toward multiculturalism in recent years, but they're small, early steps which don't nearly counterbalance the Eurocentric narrative. "White studies" -- in other words, the traditional curriculum, possibly exaggerated from what it is today -- would be compounding the historical and cultural misconceptions which permeate our society.

So let's pose your thought experiment again, adding a new wrinkle. If whites were the oppressed minority in this country and people of color were the winners who wrote the histories and dominated the national narrative, if society taught whites that they were inferior, that they deserved their place at the bottom of the socioeconomic heap, would it make sense to have a "White studies" program, even if it sometimes went overboard and overstated the value and importance of white contributions to society and dwelled on the injustices visited on white students, their parents and their ancestors? Would it be a needed counterbalance to the nationwide oppression of whites -- in this version of your thought experiment -- an attempt to correct the record and turn white children's sense of inferiority into a feeling of empowerment?

The 'carpetbagger' accusations are fair. She is chasing a political career and CD-2 will only be a stepping stone, she and McSally have that in common. If she wins, she will skip town in a few years to run for the Senate again. In truth, she should reconsider her move to Tucson and should look seriously at a run for the Senate in 2018, it is her best shot with both seats potentially being open. Anne is not right for Tucson. I don't know which candidate is but at this point she has the most to prove and overcome.

The problem with "The Mexican" is his inability to separate his Left Wing bias from his (presumed) nationality.

His he a "Mexican" (born in Mexico) and a citizen of Mexico? If so he represents a minority viewpoint.

Is he an "American" born in America who believes he is a "Chicano"? If so he is simply a "left winger," as the majority of Americans of Hispanic descent (and former Mexican citizens who immigrated HERE lawfully) do NOT share his "open borders" viewpoint.

As for land: what WAS formerly Mexico, is NOW America, paid for with blood and treasure. ALL land in EVERY country around the world was at one time paid for with blood and treasure.

"The picture you paint of educational whiteness is exactly how our educational system used to be, before programs like MAS"

No not really. Previously, our educational system was implicitly pro-white. We were an 85-90% white country, critical theory was still in its incubation stage, so you wouldn't expect a counter-narrative, and there wasn't one. Now, there are all manner of counter-narratives being generated by the critical theorists who dominate the education Academy, and these narratives can be sustained because we are now a country that is 62% white and dropping (and a city that is 50% white, and dropping).

My question is, suppose we could increase the educational outcomes of poor, underperforming white students by putting them in a system that was more EXPLICITLY pro-white than say, the curriculum taught in U.S. schools in the 1980s - a curriculum that purposefully excluded these counter-narratives. Should we do it? Is there any level of increased outcomes that would justify such a system?

Well, there ya go. The last refuge of a racist is to call people who challenge them on it "racist."

Give it a break, Dupenthal. First rule when you're in a hole--stop digging.

Re: Nathan K's "logic" problems, they are utterly illogical. The picture you paint of educational whiteness is exactly how our educational system used to be, before programs like MAS--and more importantly, teachers who challenged the institutional racism of the educational system--came along.

No one was taught that the U.S. stole half of Mexico's territory in a bald-faced war of aggression. No one was taught that Native Americans were pushed off their land and slaughtered wholesale in a bald-faced war of genocide. No one was taught that racism was still a rife and destructive force in our supposedly democratic institutions, and remains so TO THIS DAY--criminal justice, voting rights, education, you name it.

Facts like these are demonstrable and indisputable, yet children in public schools were taught a very different reality that socialized them to be part of the problem when they grew up, rather than part of the solution. Suppressing and discriminating against identities is what creates social strife. Claiming and celebrating identities only creates strife for people who feel threatened by those identities and would prefer to mask or erase them with mandatory whiteness.

THAT is why programs like MAS are absolutely necessary--because without them, racist apologists like you and Dupenthal would continue to sweep these realities under the rug.

Does 95 round to a hundred? Does 3.8 years of progress round to 4 years? I'll stick with 4 students but for all practical purposes, its five.

The students alternate, doing fluency problems at their highest possible level one day and math comprehension (word problems) the next at their highest possible level the next day.

Try sticking students on "Number Munchers" for 40 minutes a day. That would fall apart in less than a month. My students averaged 36 minutes a day of math work for an entire year. A recent research study showed that students at the tenth percentile averaged only two minutes of reading a day. Its hard to believe that they would have done much more math work.

I am glad that you paid such close attention, even if you are a critic.

Thanks, Tom, for a great column. I don't usually choke up from reading the Weekly, but this week, you got me. Even some tears...of joy. Having been around Amphi and meeting Coach Friedli (usually at the grocery store) he was ALWAYS a gentle man and one of the most positive educators I've erer met.

Should you ever pen a script for "the Vern Friedli Story", let us know. I'm in line for opening night tickets.

Ethnic studies students were not getting statistically different results on academic gains. There were t tests run. The students were gaining about 9 points. That's not enough to reduce the achievement gap. That's not excellent results. They had a very slightly higher graduation rates than the "control" group but so did every other subject and class because the numerator for the graduation rate of the "control" group was defined at a different point in time that the numerator for the graduation rate of MAS students.

What I am doing with my studies is establishing how fast students of color and of poverty can improve academically without any help from the home. If the typical Latino student can move 60 SAT points per year, 100 AZmerit points per year, that has tremendous significance. That's four times as fast as the typical student is doing now.

That means that the system is holding these kids down, that the system is racist.

That was Benjamin Franklin's breakthrough, as he studied African American students in school. He came to the conclusion that these kids were every bit as capable as white kids and that it was the institution of slavery that was holding them down. That was a huge breakthrough because not even abolitionists held that view.

We have a similar situation now. Liberals don't believe that Hispanics and Blacks have the ability to thrive and that we just have to accept their substandard academic outcomes.

There is no shame in flipping burgers or working at a convenience store. She keeps saying that she doesn't believe in pan handling, yet she wants someone to give her a little piece of property. Show me that you can work for a year...then I will believe in you.

Imagine a Tucson neighborhood. It is located mid-town, along I-10, and consists mostly of trailer homes and light industrial facilities. Its population is 63% non-Hispanic white, the vast majority of whom are poor and disadvantaged: high unemployment, high incarceration rates, rampant opioid abuse, etc. It has one high school, three middle schools and three elementary schools, all of which underperform state averages, and especially, when measured relative to other majority non-Hispanic white school districts. We will call this neighborhood "Seeping Springs" for the purposes of our discussion.

Suppose that Seeping Springs High School ("go Cowboys!") introduces an Anglo-American studies program. This program's goal is to emphasize the positives of white, Euro-American Civilization. The curriculum is implicitly, if not explicitly, pro-white. Students learn white history starting with the Greeks and going through the moon landing. They read great works of white literature and study white art and music. They are taught evolutionary biology from a pro-white perspective, from Darwin, to Madison Grant, to Jensen and Rushton. There's a lecture on average racial IQ differences. The American Civil War is taught from the perspective of "lost cause" historians like Shelby Foote, and there's a largely positive unit on Arizona's Confederate history. Non-white cultural and historical contributions are deemphasized as not being culturally relevant to white students.

Participation in the Anglo-American studies program is voluntary, and it is open to all races and ethnicities.

After five years of the program's operation, grades (even in classes outside of the AAS program), standardized test scores, and the reported self-esteem of white students in the program all show statistically significant increases. Behavior problems show marked decreases.

Question - would we accept such a program, even if it lead to better educational outcomes? Should the state be permitted to stop it?

Huppenthal's comment didn't even make any sense as a response to this article. As such, it doesn't even really deserve a lot of conversation: sort of like Drumpfs repeated tweets. The bottom line is that it is sickening seeing the endless repetition of "Anglo History Only" as the model that public education should use. Language is not the issue here--the issue is do you present history as a rich, moving and developing tapestry of rights and wrongs, causes and effects and interactions between peoples and genders and political parties and etc.? Or do you present it as a monocolor story that ends at the second world war (the last one we "won"---think about that please) and still has elementary school kids reading the same damned white male canon that I had to read fifty years ago? C'mon people, this is a no brainer. Pretending that critical people and thinkers and philosophies don't exist doesn't make them go away. Ignoring Marxism doesn't make it NOT one of the most relevant economic systems to a huge number of people in the world--it only makes you ignorant. Our recent Presidential election is a real slam to the education system in this country and the return and reinvigoration of programs like MAS are essential to turn it and this country around.